Lennart Poettering, the author of systemd, has announced: "I just put a first version of a wiki document together that lists a couple of easy optimizations to get your boot times down to [less than] 2s. It also includes a list of suggested things to hack on to get even quicker boot-ups."

wpa_supplicant provides no simple way to connect to an encrypted network on the fly; you have to be able to write to the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

ceni requires the root password.

Suspending and hibernating the computer requires long, unintuitive dbus commands. Either that or sudo, which as I understand it is a security hole.

Mounting stuff in a file manager requires either a working consolekit session (which is not possible on many distros, ranging from Debian Squeeze to Ubuntu 12.04), or messing around with PKLA files (which is again probably a security hazard). Alternatively you can use one of the various immensely bloated login managers...

I actually posted a rant about this on the Arch forums, and a lot of people seemed to agree with me. Basically it appears to me that, while Linux based GUIs for doing this stuff have improved recently, the friendly CLI environment to back it up isn't quite there.

Edit: And I should point out that by "friendly" I mean "friendly to experienced users," not "friendly to complete novices." No CLI is friendly to novices, but a good CLI must be friendly to people who know what they're doing; i.e. it shouldn't make things more complicated than they have to be. And almost every Linux CLI thing that involves wireless, power management, or device mounting makes things more complicated than they have to be.